Before the war, there was the sea.
Zainab Hassouna remembers the day before October 7 as “the last day of life” — the last day of everything beautiful in this world. The family ate together on Gaza’s beach, sat together, laughed together, “as if, somehow, we were saying goodbye to everything beautiful.”
Soon after, their home in Shuja’iyya would be a hole in the ground, and four of her five daughters would lie beneath the white shrouds of the martyrs.
A home warm, safe and beautiful
Zainab, 38, describes a childhood like any other child’s: a house full of grandparents, a father and a mother who loved each other deeply, a school with a good atmosphere. Married young, she rebuilt the home she had been raised in — “warm, safe and beautiful” — and poured into it the dream she herself was denied: education. She enrolled her children in kindergarten while they were still tiny, because her dream was their schooling.
Seven children filled that house: Gharam, Nagham, Zaid, Ghassan, Jannat, Sarah and little Bara’a, only a year and a half old.
The night the sky fell
When evacuation orders came, Zainab fled with her children to a piece of land by the road, spending a night in the street without knowing where they would sleep. There was no place that was safe. Later, her brother came to visit, and the girls begged to go with him as he went to sell fuel. Zainab stepped outside the door to lock it.
That moment divided her life in two.
“All I saw was fire exploding from the house,” she recalls. “Fire. Black smoke. Rubble fell on us. I ran downstairs faster than a missile.” Where her home had stood, there was only a hole, a huge hole. At its edge, by the stairs, she found one of her daughters. She carried her, thinking of nothing except hugging her.
Four shrouds, and one small breath
Four of her daughters — Gharam, Nagham, Jannat and Sarah — were martyred. Bara’a, the youngest, was pulled from the rubble still alive, her body burned all over, torn by shrapnel. At the crowded clinic, staff told the mother to pray for her, to accept, to be patient.
Zainab’s answer is now part of Gaza’s eternal testimony: “I buried four. I need to hold her.”
They finally allowed it. She placed her hand under her daughter’s head, hugged her, and whispered, “May God have mercy on you, my love. May you and your sisters be in heaven.” And then — a miracle in the middle of the morgue-quiet — Bara’a screamed her name. “Mama.” The entire clinic shook with Allahu Akbar. Thank God, she is alive. Her two sons, Zaid and Ghassan, injured that day, also survived.
Survival as resistance
What followed was famine: no flour, no water, no vegetables; only barley, corn and wheat, cooked over fires fed with plastic and old clothes. She burned herself three or four times cooking. She walked long distances to carry a single bucket of water. And yet from her mouth comes not defeat but defiance: “The strongest women in the world are the women of Gaza. They are stronger than men. They endured.”
Today her dream has been reduced to its barest geometry: “To see a wall standing. To lean my back against a wall. To see a roof above me to sleep under.” Because now, they are all just in tents.
In memoriam
To the roll of names we add four little ones from Shuja’iyya: Gharam Hassouna. Nagham Hassouna. Jannat Hassouna. Sarah Hassouna. Sisters. Daughters of Zainab. Children of Palestine.
Their mother’s whispered du’a at the clinic is now their epitaph: “May God have mercy on you, my love. May you and your sisters be in heaven. May God be pleased with you.”
And her promise, kept every day since, is their monument: a mother still standing, still speaking, still strong — because the strongest women in the world are the women of Gaza.
Based on Zainab Hassouna’s testimony in Press TV’s documentary series “Women of Resistance,” hosted by Sakina Datoo.
